I’ve been stuck on Twitter the last couple of days. Though I did register yonks before, and have a rudimentary understanding of how it came to be one of the hottest (and most inane) cultural phenomenons of this digital age, it didn’t hit me how useful it really could be until I decided to run It to find out when the iPhone OS update would be rolled out.

Yes, I have an Apple product. No, I am not a fanboy (I still very much love my Asus behemoth laptop running 64-bit Windows 7). let’s move on.

Forgive my lateness in entering the world of instant 140-character, to-the-second news updates. The biggest reason why I avoided using Twitter so long was only because of 2 main reasons; firstly, that I have a tendency to write long passages of pseudo-witty soliloquoys to no one in particular (as may be attested from the bulk of my blog entries), and secondly, I could not fathom an afternoon of updating myself with what some of my friends might consider activities that would interest the Internet world (tweeting “I’m at work” only serves to inform your employer that you are indeed worth your month’s salary, but if you’re a copywriter, it only gives the company more incentive to hand you the pink slip, doesn’t it?)

But in the interests of tracking when the hell Apple will allow me to start using MMS and type with my fingers more fluidly via a landscape keyboard on my severely overpriced, over-hyped, wonderfully intuitive communication device, I decided to run Twitter to see whether anyone else was wondering the same thing and if anyone knew any better.

As it turns out, tens of thousands of people were wondering the same thing (tweets ranged from querying, “Is it out yet?” to pleading, “Please, Apple, please…” to swearing “Why isn’t it f&$@ing out yet?!” to relenting, “Ah f&$@ it, I’m going to bed.”)

In the course of all this ruckus, the keywords iPhone, OS 3, and Singapore hit the top 10 trending topics on Twitter (Singapore having made the list because some twit posted a link on the iPhone OS release date from the singapore website, which caused a big hooha because everyone thought the US side pushed back the release date based on what they saw; cue a few hundred people who knew better furiously tweeting “No, that’s the Singapore site. It’s Singapore… no, Singapore, … Singapore lah!”).

I found the whole discourse utterly amusing, and in the span of 24 hours, I’ve managed to tweet more updates than I have posts on this blog, not to mention add follows to 25 people, 21 of whom I’ve never met, and get followed by another 20 or so people, 8 or 9 of whom keep wanting to show me their naked photos.

I must say, though, Twitter as a growing social networking application certainly deserves a more thorough looking into. As a means to getting a good feel on the biggest topics on the common man’s mind, as a volatile marketing tool, or as a place to get recognized at your workplace as being hard at work without even trying too hard, I’d say there’s a lot more I have to learn about how the world works, and I won’t be surprised if the lessons come in 140-character blurbs.

(By the way, I wrote all this on my post-update iPhone. My thumbs are now ready for competitive texting.)